New L.A. Dodgers Spring Training Caps get the Dragons some U.S. Pub

Above is the new cap the Los Angeles Dodgers will be wearing for this year's Spring Training in Arizona.  From what I've read the Dodgers have never worn a script "D" like this ever before. 
There is though another team that has, that team being your Chunichi Dragons.  Since it was announced several American blogs (Uni-Watch & True Blue L.A.) have picked up on the fact that it has been worn before, mainly though from the Hollywood movie that we all know and love "Mr. Baseball."

This photo has been tied to it showing Tom Selleck's approval:

Here's a baseball card showing Chunichi's version:

The Chunichi version can be purchased from New Era Japan.
The L.A. version should be available very soon.

Japanese Baseball Cards Blog Masahiro Yamamoto Tribute

Check out NPBCardGuys' Masahiro Yamamoto post here.
He's got card's of him from nearly every year of his career.

The Birth of the Modern Japanese Baseball Card Hobby Presented by NPBCardGuy

An excellent journalistic effort by NPBCardGuy can be found at the Japanese Baseball Card Blog.
He provides a great look at the beginnings of BBM through a first-hand interview and further research.  Also very interesting information about how the late-80's baseball card boom in the U.S. influenced the creation of BBM cards and influenced Calbee and the other established card-makers at that time.
Great work, I encourage everyone to check it out.

Take Me Out to the Yakyu

Came across this book the other day at the library. It's an award-winning childrens' book written and illustrated by Aaron Meshon. The book gives a fun comparison of baseball and the baseball experience in the states and in Japan. It's completely full of colorful artwork and has a Japanese-English Baseball Dictionary in the back. I definitely recommend it, good holiday gift, I will be giving one. And by the way, in his bio he says he saw his first NPB game in Nagoya and his dog is named Chubu, so I'm thinking he's a Dragons fan. Happy holidays everyone!

Dragons Hat from Ebbets

Ebbets Field Flannels currently has this Doragons hat for sale

http://www.ebbets.com/product/Chunichi-Doragons-1950-Ballcap/Ballcaps

2014 Dragons Fan Club Jersey

We took a family vacation to Japan in February and visited Aichi, Shizuoka and did some sight seeing in Tokyo, including Tokyo Disneyland.  I'm finally getting around to sharing some things from the trip.  First up is this year's official fan club jersey given to me by my brother and sister-in-law.

 

As you can see in the second photo it's got a pretty cool new logo, at least not a logo I've seen.  I'd definitely like to see more of this guy.  Sorry Shaolon, you can stay as a mascot, but your days as a minimalist/ambiguous team logo may be numbered.

A Meticulous Metric of Baseball Team Names

Plants & Animals > Animals > Mythical Creatures > Chunichi Dragons is the taxonomy of the Dragons' team name according the baseball team name poster created by the Pop Chart Lab.  You can see the poster here.  They have some other good ones as well, probably my favorite of them all is the Fantastical Fictive Beer poster, but there are some other good ones too, plus another couple of baseball related ones.  Originally saw the link to Pop Chart Lab on the Uni-Watch Holiday Gift Guide.  Happy holidays!

Dragons Menko & Cards

We just got a printer with a scanner a few days ago and I thought I would share some of the Japanese cards I have.  I don't have a big collection of Japanese cards, nor American cards anymore either.  I downsized my collection of MLB cards a couple years ago, but kept the ones of players who had played in Japan as well as Mariners ones and some other players I like.  The Japanese cards I have are either menko cards given to me by my in-laws or ones I've bought when I visited Japan.

These menko cards are from the 70's and look to be from a promotion by Pepsi.  At the bottom of each of the cards is the name of a soft drink. 

According to wikipedia Ron Woods has a son named Tyrone, but I don't believe that it's the same Tyrone Woods that played for Chunichi, at least I've never heard that it was.

The next two are a menko card of Tatsuhiko Kimata and a Calbee card of Takayoshi Nakao.  The menko card is probably from the 70's and the Nakao card would be from the 80's.  Kimata was Chunichi's starting catcher from 1965 to 1981.  Nakao was his successor and Chunichi's regular catcher until 1988.

And here are some more contemporary cards that I have:

NPB Team Websites in English

Just happened to be looking at some of the official team websites and noticed that a few teams have English pages, unfortunately Chunichi is not one of them.  You can find links to all of the team websites from this page.

The three teams below have English pages:

Yakult Swallows - Just some basic information here

Orix Buffaloes - Orix's site actually has it's own automatic translator which converts the text on most pages to English

Softbank Hawks - Quite a bit here, including info about the online goods shop which will even ship to the U.S.